The Gender Gap and COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis for Net Brazilian Formal Jobs Destruction

This paper aims to analyze the gender behavior in the Brazilian labor market due to the economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The focus is on the jobs destruction or creation during the lockdown and social distancing implementations, covering the behavior all months of 2020. For this, we use the New General Register of Employed and Unemployed (NCAGED) and apply the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition between the female and male net destruction jobs at municipal levels, considering individuals with 18 to 40 years. Furthermore, we verify the inequality for every month of 2020, pre-and post-implemented in pandemic context. We found evidence that the initial months were harmful to all formal workers but had even greater weight on women. Thus, another relevant contribution is in the inequality decomposition, where the findings show that it is largely due to structural effects.